1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a wireless communication apparatus for performing wireless communication with a plurality of communication devices.
2. Background Art
Wireless devices, communication protocols and application models are defined by a specification of a wireless communication technique called “Bluetooth™” standardized by Bluetooth SIG (Special Interest Group).
A wireless communication apparatus conforming to the specification of Bluetooth can identify wireless devices individually by use of unique device addresses given to the wireless devices respectively. Each of the device addresses has a size of 48 bits. For example, the device address can be expressed in hexadecimal notation such as “00:50:CD:11:AB:1F”.
The wireless communication apparatus can detect devices existing in the surroundings in accordance with a procedure of discovering a neighboring device defined in conformity with the specification of Bluetooth. These detected devices are identified by their device addresses respectively.
In consideration of the situation that each neighboring device is displayed to a user for recognition, the user may feel inconvenient because the device address is just a string of numerical values. In order to solve this problem, a method called “friendly name” is defined in the specification of Bluetooth.
A character string etc. allowed to be recognized by the user can be added as “friendly name” for each Bluetooth device. For example, a friendly name “Bluetooth PC” can be set for a device having a device address “00:50:CD:11:AB:1F”. In the procedure of discovering a neighboring device in conformity with the specification of Bluetooth, friendly names can be acquired from all the neighboring devices respectively. As a result, the wireless communication apparatus can present the neighboring devices with the friendly names to the user.
For example, there is however a possibility that one friendly name may be set by two devices A and B accidentally because the friendly names must be set by the devices themselves. On the other hand, default friendly names are set in the wireless communication apparatus in advance. The friendly names of such devices remain as default friendly names until the user changes the friendly names. As described above, the possibility that one friendly name may be given to a plurality of devices can be conceived sufficiently. In such a case, the user will get confused when the user wants to recognize the neighboring devices. As a solution to this problem, the user may give unique local names to the recognized neighboring devices respectively and the unique local names are displayed instead of device addresses or friendly names so that the user can find intuitively kinds of communication devices existing in the surroundings (See JP2002-281041(kokai)).
Incidentally, a technique of giving an alias name instead of the name added to another device to make the user recognize a device easily is generally often used. For example, in Web browser software “Internet Explorer™ (IE)” installed in a personal computer having an operating system Windows® made by Microsoft® Corp., URL information of Web pages once searched by a registration operation (“Add Favorite”) and default page titles set by a Web page generator can be stored. When Web page information registered by the Web browser software is displayed on default page titles, the user can identify Web pages. When the user selects a certain page title, the user can browse a Web page based on URL information associated with the page title. The user however can add an alias name to the Web page when it is difficult to identify the default page title. The Web browser software can display the registered Web page to the user on the basis of the alias name.